Thinking about the incriminating etching, I asked, ‘What about Brother Bob?’
‘Threw Judee completely under the bus. That man in the picture? Not him, no way. There wasn’t enough evidence for the police to charge him with anything, but there was plenty of evidence for Tamara. She kicked him out. Last I heard, Brother Bob is camping out in his office.’
‘Amen,’ I said.
‘Exactly.’
‘Are you OK, Georgina?’ I asked. ‘You sound exhausted.’
‘I’m fine, Hannah, really, but I’ll really perk up when that bitch is behind bars.’
Twenty minutes later, Julie called. ‘They took me, Aunt Hannah, they took me,’ Julie bubbled.
‘Who took you where?’ I teased, although I could guess. Julie’d applied to AmeriCorps, a kind of domestic Peace Corps that sent volunteers out to do good work in impoverished communities.
‘I’ve been accepted into AmeriCorps. I filled out my wish list, now I just have to wait for an assignment.’
‘What’s your first choice?’ I asked.
‘Secret,’ Julie said coyly. ‘I don’t want to jinx it. Oh, I forgot to tell you that Lacey turned up,’ she rattled on. ‘Lacey confirmed Sean’s story, not that he needs an alibi now.’ She paused to take a breath. ‘Lacey doesn’t do Facebook, can you imagine? One of her friends told her Sean was looking for her. I’m afraid we’re going to be seeing her around.’
‘Is that a bad thing?’
‘Well, his Virginity Pledge is toast, so what’s to lose?’
‘Good night, Julie,’ I said firmly, but I was smiling.
‘Goodnight, Aunt Hannah,’ Julie said, but I could tell that she was smiling, too.
THIRTY-FIVE
Dressed in our grubbiest work clothes, Ruth and I drove north on Route 2 in an elderly Ford F-150 pickup truck we’d borrowed from my brother-in-law, Dennis Rutherford. Just north of the South River Bridge, I rattled and jolted into the parking lot of the commercial storage facility where Daddy had been keeping the household contents of his former home. Once inside, I used the key Daddy had given me to open the padlock on his unit.
Ruth raised the roller door. ‘Good Lord!’ she said.
We faced a daunting wall of furniture, boxes and storage containers, stacked six feet high. ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ she added.
‘One step at a time,’ I said as I pulled a folded aluminum lawn chair with a broken plastic seat strap off the top of a charcoal grill and set it aside in the hallway.
Ruth grabbed a blue bicycle by the handlebars and eased it out of the locker. Both tires were flat. ‘This used to be mine,’ she said, ‘until I got the ten speed for my birthday. I can’t understand why he kept it.’ The kickstand was missing, so she leaned the bike against the door of the adjoining locker. ‘Why didn’t he have a garage sale?’
‘Too busy, I suppose. Besides, after Mom died, you remember how he couldn’t be talked into parting with anything. “Save it for another day”, he’d say.’
Ruth hauled out a second lawn chair and the cushions that matched it and piled them next to the bike, followed by the charcoal grill. ‘I guess another day has finally come.’
For the next ten minutes, my sister and I relocated furniture and household items from the storage unit to the hallway, gradually clearing a path through the center of the unit. It was like an episode of Storage Wars, except that nobody was bidding on the contents.
‘What are we looking for exactly?’ Ruth asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘If we’re lucky, it will be a box labeled “Charlotte’s Things”.’
‘Hah,’ Ruth snorted. ‘Do you ever remember seeing anything like that in Mom and Dad’s attic?’
I had to admit that I hadn’t, primarily because I’d never been in my parents’ attic except one time accompanying the pest control man who had been hired to check out a squirrel invasion.
‘Maybe there’ll be something that will help solve the mystery surrounding White Bear’s death,’ Ruth said.
‘Here, take these,’ I said, handing two kites – a dragon and a bird of paradise – over to Ruth.
‘Ah, these bring back memories,’ she said. ‘Remember flying them on the beach that summer before I went to college?’ She set the kites carefully aside. ‘Maybe your grandkids would like them now.’
‘Into the truck, then,’ I said.
Stacked to my right, in two columns five high, were cardboard boxes labeled: ‘Books’. I eased between the books and a drop leaf table that had once been in our mother’s kitchen. It, too, was stacked with boxes marked, appropriately, ‘Kitchen’.
What was I looking for? A vintage trunk, maybe? A carved wooden hope chest? An antique safe?
A handle protruded from under the kitchen table. I moved a floor lamp in order to kneel down and check it out. ‘Oh my gosh,’ I said, ‘it’s my Chatty Cathy doll!’
Blue-eyed Cathy sat bolt upright in a miniature baby stroller. She was still dressed in the bright yellow gingham dress she’d worn when I last played with her, and a ruffled crinoline with lacy bloomers underneath. Her blond ponytails were tied with matching yellow ribbons. I reached under her dress, grabbed the plastic ring I knew I’d find there and pulled the string. ‘Please brush my hair,’ Cathy said. I laughed. ‘I don’t remember her being that whiney.’ I pulled the string a second time. ‘Give me a kiss,’ the doll said. I kissed the top of her head, smoothed her dress and settled her back into her stroller. ‘This is a keeper,’ I said as I rolled it out into the hallway on its miniature wheels.
On a pair of stacked end tables just beyond the kitchen table I found three boxes marked ‘Ruth’, ‘Hannah’ and ‘Georgina’. While Ruth wrestled with a Queen Anne chair, I ripped the packing tape off the top of the box marked ‘Hannah’ and looked inside. In neatly labeled folders Mom had saved my juvenile artwork and every report card and school photograph from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Records of my immunizations, too, and a packet of letters postmarked Oberlin, Ohio, held together by a rubber band that disintegrated when I touched it. In the days before the Internet took over our lives, I wrote home from college once a week.
Tears pricked at my eyes.
Ruth noticed. ‘Hannah?’
I looked up helplessly. ‘There’s a box here for you, too. And one for Georgina.’
Ruth eased the box gently out of my hands. ‘Why don’t we save these for later?’
‘All those memories,’ I said, feeling defeated. I eyed the upholstered chair, longing to curl up in it as I had when it sat in the corner of our living room, next to the fireplace.
‘You’re the one who set us off on this fishing expedition,’ Ruth scolded. ‘You can’t wimp out now.’
‘Right.’ I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, squared my shoulders and waded back in bravely.
‘If I were Grandmother and I wanted to keep personal things private,’ Ruth called out, ‘I’d keep them in my bedroom.’
‘I’m remembering a cedar chest that sat at the foot of Mom’s bed,’ I said.
I stood on tiptoe, peering over an ancient television – with rabbit ears! – toward the back of the unit. ‘I see a four-poster back there, but it will take me a while to get to it.’
With Ruth’s help, I moved a mattress and box springs to one side and carted a headboard and footboard out into the hallway so we could gain access to an oak chest of drawers that had once been my grandmother’s. The two small drawers at the top held nothing but flowered shelf liner, a paperclip and two blond bobby pins. Except for shelf liner, the three large drawers below them were equally empty. Two bedside tables that were part of the same bedroom suite held no surprises other than a desiccated trap-door spider.
While I was disposing of the spider, Ruth uncovered two oversize plastic storage containers of sheets and towels. ‘Didn’t Daddy take anything with him?’ she complained, shoving the containers, still stacked one atop the other, aside.
‘I think Neelie was fully sto
cked with linens,’ I said. ‘I know he took his Navy memorabilia.’
‘What about his desk?’ she asked.
‘That, too,’ I said, venturing deeper into the unit.
‘It’s always the last place you look!’ I yelled in triumph.
I’d found Mother’s cedar chest, resting on top of an upholstered loveseat and covered with a quilted shipping blanket. By the time Ruth joined me, I’d already raised the lid and was pawing through its contents. I found my parents’ 1952 wedding album and a square box about the size of a dinner plate containing the wedding bells from the top of their wedding cake. A Lord & Taylor shirt box held a christening gown, ivory with age, wrapped in tissue paper. My sisters and I had worn it, each in turn, for our baptisms. ‘I wondered where this gown had got to,’ I said, folding the tissue paper back around it again. ‘They were moving when I needed it for Emily.’
‘Look at this.’ Ruth had unearthed a red leather-bound book with ‘Autographs’ embossed in gold script on the cover. She flipped the book open to the flyleaf. ‘It was Mom’s in seventh grade.’ She chuckled, then paged forward. ‘Oh my gosh, listen! Someone named Polly wrote:
Lois and John,
Sitting in a tree,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
First comes love,
Then comes marriage,
Then comes Lois with a baby carriage.
‘I wonder who John was?’ I laughed out loud at the silliness of the verse.
‘I don’t think we need to know,’ Ruth said, setting the autograph book aside in the pile destined for the truck.
The cedar chest was too heavy for Ruth and me to carry out to the truck on our own, so we systematically sorted through its contents. At the bottom of the chest, under a garment bag containing my mother’s wedding suit, was an oversized padded mailer marked KEEP. The mailer was sealed.
I glanced up at my sister who was looming like a vulture.
‘What are you waiting for?’ she said. ‘You don’t need my permission.’
So I seized the string tab and tore the mailer open.
‘If we’re lucky,’ I had quipped to Ruth earlier that morning, ‘it will be a box labeled “Charlotte’s Things”.’
We’d been incredibly lucky. Nestled inside the mailer I found an old-fashioned scrapbook, its manila pages pre-punched to fit over posts in a black cover which was fastened on with shoestring, tied in a neat bow.
‘Charlotte: Her Book’ was written on the title page in Gothic letters using India ink. Charlotte had been practicing her calligraphy.
My sister and I stared at each other, then at the scrapbook in reverent silence. I turned to the first page. ‘It seems to start in mid-high school,’ I said, noting a corsage flattened between the pages next to a booklet titled, ‘Spring Formal’. Charlotte had been a popular girl. Every slot on her dance card was filled, but the first and last dances of the evening had been claimed by the same young man, S. Smith.
‘That has to be our grandfather,’ Ruth said.
I closed the scrapbook carefully and held it close to my chest. ‘Let’s take this out where the light is better.’
A few minutes later, my sister and I sat side-by-side on folding lawn chairs, watching our grandmother’s early life scroll by. Tickets to a concert by Ben Pollack and His Californians. Postcards from Quechee Gorge near her home in Vermont as well as places farther flung like New York City and Niagara Falls.
Charlotte had graduated from high school in June of 1928 and almost immediately bought a train ticket from White River Junction, Vermont to Pierre, South Dakota, with a stopover in Chicago (during the height of Prohibition). Matchbooks and ticket stubs suggested she’d stayed at the Allerton Hotel and attended a showing of ‘A Mysterious Lady’ with Greta Garbo at the Biograph.
She’d owned a camera, too. At some point Charlotte climbed to the top of a building on Wacker Drive overlooking the Chicago River and the massive construction works that had been required to straighten it. Further on in her journey, blurry photos captured Midwestern towns from her window as the train sped through.
She’d saved a menu from the dining car. Oyster stew cost seventy-five cents, deep dish blueberry pie (baked on car today!) was thirty cents and a special prime rib dinner with all the trimmings would have set Charlotte back just a dollar ten.
Eventually she documented her arrival in Pierre, moving into the boarding house on North Huron, a sprawling Victorian with a front porch large enough to hold all the residents who posed for a group picture there in the summer of 1929. I spotted Charles Keene at once, lounging casually on the steps, straw boater in hand. Dressed in a lacy white frock, Charlotte stood directly behind Charles, leaning against a pillar. The ample, apron-clad woman to the far right had to be their landlady, Mrs Lumley. If I referred back to the 1930 census data, I might be able to sort the others out eventually, too.
Charlotte had chosen to wear a short jacket and wide-legged pleated slacks for a photo while standing on the running board of a Model T, her head cocked to one side, smiling shyly for whomever held her camera. ‘She looks so like Amelia Earhart in that shot,’ Ruth observed.
I agreed. ‘A kindred spirit.’
Some Lakota lived in teepees then, we learned from Charlotte’s photos, and as Wasula had told me, rodeos had been big, with a capital B. It’s hard to capture a bucking bronco, but Charlotte had tried: she’d dedicated four pages of her scrapbook to action-packed rodeo scenes.
I turned the page and uncovered a treasure – Joseph, Henry and a teenaged Wasula posing against a split-rail fence. At Wasula’s feet sat a black and white dog. Everyone was smiling, even the dog, except for Henry who had turned his face away from the camera and seemed to be glowering at something beyond the frame.
‘Thank goodness she labeled everyone,’ Ruth said. ‘What kind of dog is Scout, do you know?’
I squinted. ‘Some sort of mixed collie, I guess.’
‘So, which brother did Charlotte favor?’ Ruth asked. ‘Joseph or Henry?’
‘Joseph, for sure,’ I said. ‘Henry looks like a sourpuss, wishing he were anywhere else but.’
After turning to the next page, however, the answer to Ruth’s question was obvious: Joseph alone, posing before the same fence, Stetson pushed back on his head.
Joseph grinning broadly, showing off his trophy, a silver belt buckle.
A newspaper article on the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede where Joseph White Bear had won the saddle bronc event. Charlotte had underlined his name three times.
‘She was sweet on him,’ Ruth said.
Tucked between the next two pages we found a slim packet of notes, written on notebook paper in what I assumed was Lakota, with the exception of a thank you note in English from Mrs Two Knives who was grateful for Charlotte’s help with a school fair. ‘I’ll have to ask Sam or his aunt to translate these for us,’ I said, setting the packet aside for the time being.
The rodeo clipping was followed by several from the Burlington Free Press held together by a rusted paper clip. Someone must have mailed them to Charlotte because, ‘See what you missed!’ was written across the article on top in barely legible pencil.
Wednesday, August 31st, 1932
The curtain will rise on Burlington’s great celestial drama – the sun’s total eclipse – at exactly 2:16 p.m. today.
The following day’s paper reported:
Celestial show races through skies filled with big, slow-moving clouds. Some gazers see corona as a color spectacle, others as a yellow glow. Haze will probably ruin many a plate of scientific photographers. Spectators fared better than astronomers, for the eye was better than the camera in this eclipse, and much that the plates missed excited the admiration of millions.
My eye had been caught by another headline: ‘Girl, smoking glass to witness the eclipse, nearly burned to death’ when Ruth reached across and ran a finger over the masthead. ‘September 1, 1932,’ she read aloud. ‘Didn’t you reckon Mom was conceived around that time?’
My heart did a somersault. ‘Ohmahgawd.’
‘Dee-dee-do-do, dee-dee-do-do,’ chanted Ruth, making ‘Twilight Zone’ noises. ‘I wonder …’ She turned the pages. Blank, blank, and blank again. The article about the solar eclipse was the last thing Charlotte had pasted into her scrapbook.
‘It’s as if her life ended with that eclipse,’ Ruth said.
I looked my sister squarely in the eyes. ‘Act One had come to an end, at least. A little more than a month later, she would start life over as a married woman.’
‘A pregnant married woman,’ Ruth said.
I closed the scrapbook carefully. When I picked up the padded mailer intending to return the scrapbook to it, a five by seven inch photograph slithered out and fluttered to the concrete floor. I stooped to retrieve it.
A man sits astride a white horse. While the horse seems transfixed by the camera, the man stares into the distance, giving me a clear view of his chiseled, noble profile. He wears dark trousers, a jacket with fringed leather cuffs and a black Stetson hat. The hand resting on his thigh holds a cigarette. He is Joseph White Bear.
I turned the photo over. ‘My Knight,’ Grandmother had written.
THIRTY-SIX
As my mother was fond of saying, ‘You can’t get there from here.’
Although I plugged BWI to PIR into every travel website known to the modern Internet, no airline flew direct from Baltimore to Pierre. In the end I accomplished the trip piecemeal, booking a flight to Denver then catching a California Pacific flight to Pierre which, for some reason, didn’t fly on Wednesdays and Fridays.
The plane landed at 12:45. I had no checked luggage, so it took only minutes to make my way to the Budget Rental Car counter and pick up my car.
Interstate 90 runs west out of Pierre, straight as a ruler, for mile after hypnotizing mile. I found myself nodding off. I was minutes from pulling off to the side of the road for a catnap, when the interchange with SD73 at Kadoka came into view along with a welcome cluster of gas stations, restaurants and a budget inn.
Tangled Roots Page 20
